Goodspeed wrote:Having every option available would prove broken and benefit some civs more than others.
how?
I'm not sure if it would truly be broken, but it would definitely benefit some civs more than others in
certain situations. For example:
Say you're playing Germany; with the deck system it is simply not worth it to have economic upgrades in your deck because you risk sacrificing your mid-game, which is where Germany is strongest.
Now, your opponent is playing Iroquois. A civ whose military could arguably compete with yours in the mid-game.
Your game happens to stalemate in the mid-game and drag into the lategame. In a normal supremacy gameāunless the German player has specifically structured their deck for this sort of situationāthis lategame scenario is not that bad for Iroquois. Iroquois military arguably outscales yours, but they lack access to things like factories. Iroquois ends up with a slightly better military, but a slightly weaker lategame economy: an imbalance, but a healthy one.
Remove the deck system, however, and suddenly in this same situation Germany suddenly has access to 11 lategame eco upgrades (when normally they would only have 3 or 4 in their deck at most), while Iroquois has only 2. All Germany has to do to win the game now is stall until their economy wins them the game.
Each civilizations cards are different, with different emphases placed on different types of cards or playstyles, and a lot of civs are not even close to equal in specific scenarios. Native civilizations in particular would suffer more greatly than other civs, as they tend to lack significant economic or military upgrades.
To conclude, while the change would not affect the majority of games too much, in certain situations it would be very difficult for some civs to compete without significant additions or changes to the current select of cards in the homecities, which may be somewhat too large of an undertaking.
Yemshi also does have something of a point that it would limit the information you can gleam from the opponent, but I don't agree with him that it reduces options: it would change a few of the ways you currently scout and adapt to your opponent, but honestly I rarely see people actually check their opponents decks, much less adapt to them. The biggest difference here would be on water maps or when a player intends to do something like a Fast Industrial, where they don't have to limit their options in order to get the necessary cards for their strategy into their deck.
Maybe increasing the card limit from 25 to 27 or 28 might be a decent alternative to the removing decks suggestion? That way you can at least include some more niche age 1 or age 4 cards and keep your options a little bit more open that way. Perhaps even increasing the card limit per age from 10 to 11 at the same time, but I'm not certain that a change of this sort is at all necessary.
Edit: as an aside, it would be interesting to see if people would ever use something like the 1 culv shipment if the deck system was removed.